Sunday, March 31, 2013

Twitter Marches on

March is over, and I've been doing these Twitter compendiums for a year. Not sure if anyone else enjoys them, but I find them amusing and a nice reminder of the topics that flowed past my attention in the previous month.

'Millennial' – the term that no one of that generation actually uses to define themselves.
By Michael Crowe

Harvard's top five hedge fund managers made almost as much as the 450 College of Arts and Science professors in 2004.
By Nikhil Goyal

Just got a very detailed description of what happened to ladies with UTIs before antibiotics. I think my bladder is puckered in fear.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker

Weird bit: There was big risk of dying from UTI back then, but if you survived, almost no recurrence. Body figured out how to beat bacteria
By Maggie Koerth-Baker

So you could have that small comfort while you were peeing blood and your doctor was trying to stuff turpentine up your urethra.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker

Some people have a hard time with Nina Totenberg. I could listen to her all day but 2 minutes of Frank DeFord & I wonder if ears are worth it.
By Chris Steller

Consider wearing camouflage clothing: it is a well-known fact that rapists don't rape what they can't see. #safetytipsforwomen
By Hahahamdi

HULK SUPPORT QUEER AND FEMINIST CHALLENGES TO MARRIAGE AS INSTITUTION. HULK ALSO CHAMPION SAME-SEX MARRIAGE. HULK VAST, CONTAIN MULTITUDES.
By FEMINIST HULK

Idea: There should be one magazine for people who aren't interested in famous people.
By Chris Steller

97 percent of infractions in school that resulted in suspension involved no weapons, no drugs, and no alcohol. #WarOnKids
By Nikhil Goyal

Sunday Advice time: avoid the argument "X is like a religion" where x = a non-theistic system. It's a tedious, overused fallacious analogy.
By Tim Minchin

If the county instituted more #freetransit, many infrastructure projects would go away. In the end, it would be cheaper.
By Jane Walker

Why does "reform" mean cutting arts, physical education but more testing, more administrators, more consultants?
By Diane Ravitch

The "Bad Teacher" joins the "Welfare Queen" as the persona the public most likes to hate while their rights are taken away.
By Mark Naison

With each day, my love and appreciation grows for the short, declarative sentence.
By Andy Kroll

Colloquial is one of those words that's not what it means.
By Chris Steller


Wanna feel invisible? Spend the day walking around Harlem w/ @HenryLouisGates. At best people thought I was security.
By W. Kamau Bell

Am I the only one who thinks "a special place in hell" sounds like it'd be nicer than just plain old regular hell?
By Tim Carvell

12 yr old, as we pass a bus bench: "Dad, what's an urban luxury specialist?"
By Chris Steller
My daughter (5) upon seeing a few minutes of the new Hobbit movie: "Why aren't there any girls in this movie?" #raisedonmiyazaki
By John Siracusa


This is so true. It actually hurts.
By Hannah

Occam's razor: now with FIVE BLADES and aloe strip.
By Pinboard

Eventually one of these Republican congressmen is going to find out his daughter is a woman, and then we're all set.
By Anil Dash

Most who fear genetically altered food are unaware that nearly all food has been genetically altered via artificial selection.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

As Dr King said, I have a dream that some day all injustices that personally impact members of my immediate family will be resolved.
By mattyglesias

#degrowth advocates are called extreme today. But it is already happening. We just want less pain. Future will see us as moderates.
By Free Public Transit

Rob Portman: A conservative who has been mugged by morality
By John Cook


I don't know why people get confused, it's very simple...
By Zaphod Zoeller

It's illegal to shine a laser pointer at a plane because a cat might attack the plane.
By Scott

Throughout history, more women have died in childbirth than men have died in battle.
By Harvard University

A meaningless statistic is cited every 5.6 seconds.
By Chris Steller

RT @lawremipsum: Are Travelers Checks still a thing? > No, the companies moved on to payday loans, international wires & other usury.
By Charlie Quimby

I'm not lazy, I'm on energy-saving mode.
By Tracey - Facts -

Reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, struck by this: until Lincoln, every president could walk down the street anonymously.
By Kurt Andersen

There is no such thing as "only an asshole online." What you mean is you're an asshole all the time but are also scared of getting beat up.
By Emma Story

The first rule of SXSW is: you always talk about SXSW.
By Aaron Levie

Between the time it was discovered and the time it was unclassified as a planet, Pluto did not even complete one revolution around the sun.
By Science Porn

Haha they made a handheld device that contains all human knowledge and now we make fun of each other for looking at it too much.
By David Thorpe

"I don't like water because I'm a fan of taste."
By Preschool Gems

There is a warehouse with all the Ts from people saying "Wha?" There is a faraway planet where people are sent who use the term "Squee!"
By Chris Steller

Know why standardized testing isn't a good measure of schools? Sometimes a 3rd grader farts in the middle of the test, and all bets are off.
By evelyn pollins

You only live once, so don't forget to spend 15 hours every day on the internet, desperately searching for the validation of strangers.
By Chris Rock

If only graphic designers cared half as much about software and font piracy as they do about spec work.
By Okay Type

I'm more concerned about Scalia Law than Sharia Law.
By Just Some Jerk

If a TED talk "restored your faith in humankind," consider stepping away from the internet & interacting with actual humankind more often.
By Xeni Jardin


Mmmmghghhmmmmfffmmmmrghhmmmff
By Emergency Cute Stuff

Waiting for your turn to talk is not the same as listening.
By Mike Monteiro

"So does the Pope's son take over today?" my son asked, perhaps not understanding some of the nuances of Catholicism.
By Greg Knauss

Corporations aren’t people, they’re more like a hostile, sentient AI.
By Andy Baio

Someday just sit down, watch, and listen to a highway. Ask yourself, is this really an achievement of which we should be proud?
By Free Public Transit

Evernote password reset. Check. Lingering feeling that cloud-based services for private data might be a bad idea. Check.
By Jonathan Foley

Might look like I am just standing here doing nothing, but really am trying to do front flip and back flip at same time.
By Bigfoot TheBigfoot

NYC is a miracle of PR. What's so good about somewhere that doesn't sleep? For that matter, what's wrong with a normal-sized apple?
By Tim Minchin

O'Brien is now leaving "Downton Abbey." In keeping with the show's tradition of narrative plausibility, she will die in an ape attack.
By Tim Carvell

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Pay the Real Cost

The current story about the EPA cutting the amount of sulfur in gasoline is a perfect example of externalized costs. Big oil hates the new standards and says they'll raise the price of a gallon of gas 6 to 9 cents.

Well, so what, big oil? The cost of more pollution in the atmosphere is borne as health care costs by all of us, including those who don't drive at all. Why shouldn't the person who gets the benefit of driving pay for that cost instead?

And on a similar topic... the New York Times reports that traffic delays in U.S. cities are increasing, which they report as a good thing because it means the economy is improving. Their graphs show data from the Gridlock Index. Clearly, wasteful idling is up in L.A., San Francisco, Honolulu, and particularly New York. It's not up in Washington, D.C., though, which is reported to have had the most consistently strong economy. Congestion is down in European cities, reflecting, it is said, their lack of recovery.

Free public transit with expanded bus routes would cut down on both congestion and pollution, gutting not only the oil companies and but also our CO2 output. So many things to recommend it, but it's never even discussed.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Two Signs from Everett, Washington

You never know what you'll run across in an American town.


This labor temple is in Everett, Washington, which was the site of the Everett Massacre in 1916. According to the Wikipedia,

[There was] an armed confrontation between a mob, led by local Sheriff Donald McRae, and Industrial Workers of the World members. The IWW members were on the steamer Verona and sought to land, but Sheriff McRae denied them his permission. Shooting broke out and at least five IWW's were killed and two in the Sheriff's mob were killed, though they might have been accidentally shot by others in their allegedly drunken group.
The hand-painted sign on the labor temple is clearly much more recent than that era -- I'd say 1940s at the earliest, but probably a bit later. It has been lovingly maintained.

Lest you think Everett is the next best thing to the People's Republic of Madison, here is another sign I saw just a few blocks from the labor temple:


I'm amused by the contrast between these two signs. Not so much their messages, but how one was hand-painted with obvious craft and attention to readability and word emphasis, while the other was thoughtlessly computer-generated, completely without differentiation among the words. It's hard to read, too.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Bike that Glows in the Dark

I love bicycles and bicyclists, but I wish they (and I when I am one of them) were easier to see at night.

A Massachusetts company called Halo Coatings has created a retroreflective paint that can be put on just about anything. And one of the first candidates is the bicycle.

Bike being ridden at night, glowing white
Not only is it a great idea, the product will also last for the life of the bike, is UV-stable (which is not true of reflective laminates), and is more environmentally friendly than other retroreflectives (no VOC or heavy metals, for instance).

Give these people a better mousetrap award, please.

Via Boing Boing.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Dean Baker and Economic Realities

I don't think I've mentioned economist Dean Baker on the blog before. I've been a fan of his since he spoke locally at a Jobs Now! Coalition event about 10 years ago. His appearance last month on Up with Chris Hayes, along with Paul Krugman, was one of the best moments I've seen in recent television.

Baker produces a constant stream of reasoned, coherent critiques of what passes for economic journalism and commentary in the Washington Post and New York Times. Honestly, there are so many of them that I can't keep up, but there was one this morning that grabbed my attention.

In it, he takes on NPR Planet Money's recent series about the increase in Social Security disability claims. In light of Ezra Klein's 21 graphs that show the incredibly high amount Americans pay for health care compared to the rest of the world, Baker writes, the amount spent on disability coverage is nothing. Emphasis has been added by me:
While the cost of the disability program has increased due to the economic collapse, once the economy recovers it is projected to cost less than 0.9 percent of GDP, a bit more than one tenth of the excess cost of our health care system. In fact the entire cost of the combined Social Security retirement and disability program are projected to peak at under 6.4 percent of GDP in the mid 2030s, less than 80 percent of the excess cost of the U.S. health care system. NPR has no problem pronouncing the cost of the disability program as unaffordable, implying to its listeners that it must be changed, but it doesn't make the same pronouncements about the U.S. health system.

The failure of the media and politicians to focus anywhere near as much attention on the excess cost of the health care system as they do on the cost of programs that benefit low and middle income people is especially striking since one of the obvious ways to reduce costs is to simply take advantage of the lower costs in other systems. (Yes, it would make more sense to fix our health care system, but trade is a hell of a lot simpler.)

Yet, the media and politicians, including those who talk about "free trade" as a god equivalent, never mention health care as an item that should be subject to trade. As Klein's charts show, there are enormous potential savings from allowing people to have major medical procedures in other countries, from allowing seniors to use Medicare to buy into other countries' health care systems and of course in bringing in much lower paid doctors from other countries.

But the media and politicians don't have these items on their agenda. Instead they produce lengthy pieces telling us that we can't afford to provide insurance to people with disabilities that keep them from working. Did I mention that rich and powerful interest groups make huge amounts of money from this waste?
I have to repeat that one statement:

Social Security -- including both retirement and disability -- will peak in the mid-2030s at 6.5 percent of GDP, and that will be less than 80 percent of just the excess costs in the U.S. health care system.

Financial interests surely have something to do with the fact that we never hear about this from the media, but it's also an example of status quo bias, as described in a nice op-ed by philosopher Sarah Conly in this morning's Star Tribune. The media is just as inured to the status quo as anyone else.

That's why we need Dean Baker to keep pulling our coats about this reality and lots of others.

__________

An earlier post about Social Security disability

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

QLaser Scam: the Dumbest of the Dumb

The headline on the tall, narrow ad in Monday's Star Tribune was enough to set off my skeptic radar:

New Medicine Based on an 88-Year Old [sic] Theory by Albert Einstein Can Help Almost Everyone Who Is Sick or Injured!

Ah yes, the exclamation point, the appeal to an unquestionable scientific authority, the overclaim of helping everyone, combined with a few stock photos and an editorial-mimicking layout. Was quackery afoot?

The ad copy that follows did not disappoint. It seems that there's an actual doctor, named Larry Lytle, who thinks putting a flashlight against your skin will heal you of every injury and illness because "if your cells don't receive enough energy, they will weaken and the body will become sick."

Hooboy. Here are some highlights:
  • Guess which type of doctor has been quickest to adopt the flashlight (oops, excuse me, the low-level QLaser System) technology? You guessed it -- sports medicine doctors, the biggest placebo promoters of all.
  • The asterisk footnote at the end of the text says "The QLaser System is indicated for providing temporary relief of pain associated with osteoarthritis of the hand.... No other medical treatment claims are made or implied." But the ad clearly makes claims, such as "It Works So Well on So Many Different Problems, It Seems Like It Couldn't Possibly Be True / But it is true!"
  • More often, though, the ad uses hedging language, which to my mind is the same as "implied," but I'm not a lawyer. Examples of hedging include "it is quite possibly more effective than drugs or surgery," "might help relieve you of any disease," "might possibly save your life," "for some people," "could truly guide them to a miracle!"
  • The ad uses the classic science fiction technique of tossing out pseudo-scientific terminology, such as "increase cell permeability" and "correct faulty DNA" (oh, right, what a howler).
I particularly loved this use of quotation marks:
For many people who know about it, it is the "medicine" they use now.
Yes, putting a word between quotation marks like this usually implies the thing in quotes isn't real. So thanks for confirming that, copywriters.

The ad doesn't ask for any money, because it's not selling the QLaser System; instead, it's giving away a free booklet that explains the system. I imagine this is a way of placating state attorneys general who might be annoyed with all of the unproven medical claims.

I wonder what the follow-up contact is like for those who request the free booklet, but I'm not curious enough to call and find out. My hypothesis is that the ad is actually a ploy to generate a mailing list of the most gullible people in America, and that's a list I don't want to be on.

_____

My friends at Science-Based Medicine wrote about the QLaser in August 2012. I must have been on vacation that week. Mark Crislip points out that Lytle is a doctor of.... dentistry. As Crislip puts it, "and when I think of universal disease treatments, I think dentist."

Monday, March 25, 2013

The Ultimate Cute Cat Video

This lion cub has the look of a roaring lion figured out, but not the sound.


Maybe it's just me, but I think he could be called on to create the sound effects of a metal detector wand.

What did I do before there were videos like this?

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Extending the Co-op Idea

A Minnesota guy named Joel Albers wants to combine two of my favorite things: co-ops and universal health care.

Albers is trying to initiate a cooperatively owned health care plan called Co-op Care. It would behave like a miniature version of universal health insurance, where everyone buys in at the same rate and gets the same benefits. Members are likely to have a limited choice of clinics and hospitals, at least to start, but I still think it's an exciting effort.

Albers hopes to have the plan up and running so it can be included in Minnesota's recently pass insurance exchange, MNsure.

The group meets at the Minnehaha Free Space, 3747 Minnehaha Avenue in Minneapolis. Check the Co-op Care website or email Albers at joel@uhcan-mn.org for info the next meeting.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Upward Mobility, Right

Minneapolis teacher Eva Lockhart had an op-ed in Saturday's Star Tribune that everyone should read.

She described a pseudonymous student named Malik, who has done everything society would expect from a poor student. He's got a 3.75 GPA, takes International Baccalaureate classes, plays football, does community service projects with the Honor Society, and works two jobs 30 hours a week. (One of which is an hour away by bus. He must do homework on the way.)

Yet as he approaches the end of his time in high school,  he has applied for almost 20 scholarships and has not gotten one.

Reading Lockhart's story made me angry, but also a bit skeptical, I have to admit. Like most people, I thought there was money available for kids who really can't afford to go to college. But, assuming Lockhart hasn't fictionalized or composited the stories of different students, that is clearly not the case for Malik, at least not yet. One thing at work here, I think, is that he's applying for free-standing scholarships that he could take to any college, rather than for aid through specific colleges. But few colleges are set up to provide full aid, including living expenses, to even the neediest students.

I made the mistake of peeking at the comments on Lockhart's story. Almost everyone is skeptical except the teachers, who all confirmed that they see similar situations all the time. The trolls suggested Malik clearly isn't good at math since he thinks people will give him money for free, or that he should join the military to pay for school (at the same time that educational benefits for the huge number of veterans returning from the Middle East are being cut -- good suggestions, troll!). The world of Strib comments is a sad, sad place.

What I bet will happen now is that someone will step forward to contact Lockhart with money for Malik to go to school, and that will be a great thing. But it's like the problem with the cute endangered animals getting funding when the homely ones go wanting -- it doesn't address the larger problem.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Curses, You Wascally Wabbit

When did Dick Dastardly's excellent verb become an adjective of the Easter bunny?

Box full of chocolate rabbits, wrapped in foil, labeled Foiled Chocolate Rabbits
Or maybe this is a box full of rabbits whose ambitions have been thwarted at every turn.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Mismatches

When I was in second grade, my teacher gave a quiz on letter writing. I don't remember exactly, but I think there were questions about how you start a letter, how you finish a letter, and probably about the body of the letter.

Maybe I had been out sick right before that day, but somehow, I thought the questions were about the letters of the alphabet rather than those of an epistolary nature, as the teacher intended. So my answers were completely nonsensical. I think she let me retake the quiz later.

Another time, as a graduate student heavily involved in extracurricular activities, I went on a retreat with a student organization. We were doing one of those get-to-know you exercises. We were each supposed to write an answer to this question (paraphrased, I'm sure): "Where do you go to get your head together and gain perspective?"

I wrote down my answer, and then we shared. A male, senior staffperson from the group went first: "I go to the wilds of Montana to fish and be in nature," he said.

I realized immediately that I had understood the question in a completely different way, but, doggedly, I read my answer aloud to the group:

"I go to the women's bathroom on the second floor of the student union, shut myself in a stall, and put my head down on my arms for a few minutes."

Oh, well. It was the truth at that time.


A girl named Hope had a similar problem on a math quiz.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The Real Illness Is Anxiety

Here's a cool new term for the modern dictionary: idiopathic environmental intolerance.

This is the label applied to people who think they're being made sick by WiFi signals, EMF, or wind turbines. Research shows that people with general anxiety are especially likely to complain of feeling ill if they're shown a film about an environmental problem like EMF, and then given a sham exposure to that environmental condition.

Fifty-four percent of the people in this study reported symptoms that they attributed to their fake EMF exposure.

As the researchers concluded,

Media reports about the adverse effects of supposedly hazardous substances can increase the likelihood of experiencing symptoms following sham exposure and developing an apparent sensitivity to it. Greater engagement between journalists and scientists is required to counter these negative effects.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Good, Bad, and Odd

Good: The Supreme Court ruled today in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons that people who buy a book (or any other object) have the right to resell it or give it away without consulting or remunerating the original seller. Well, duh, right? Odd: The decision was 6 - 3, with Stephen Breyer writing for the majority and Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing the dissent, joined by Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. I haven't read the dissent yet, but that trio of dissenters really weirds me out.

Bad: Companies increasingly extort money out of their customers after purchase in order to fix or modify the products because there is proprietary, copyrighted software involved. Examples given in a recent Wired article include a farmer who spent $200,000 on a couple of planting machines, and then had to fly in a technician to fix them because the repair manual was copyrighted so neither he nor local mechanics could have access to it. Good: It seems like policy makers may be starting to wake up to how stupid all of this restriction is, given today's Supreme Court decision (tangentially related) and the outcry over being able to unlock phones.


Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod, from Wired

Bad: The Keystone XL pipeline is coming up for a vote very soon. The vote seems to be getting almost no coverage, and I get the sense it's going to pass. Call your senators if you care about the future more than keeping the price of gas artificially low and lining the Koch brothers' pockets. Good: Organizing against KXL has brought together people who usually don't speak to each other. According to an AP story, Nebraska ranchers who believe in property rights are working side-by-side with organic farmers and environmentalists. One conservative, Republican rancher said, "I'm associated with people I never dreamed I would be associated with. There's a stigma on people considered environmentalists. I had that concept." An organic farmer followed with this: "We're all more similar than we may have thought."

Good: Before he retires, Senator Carl Levin plans to take on the IRS's lack of interest in the connection between nonprofit 501(c)4 organizations and Super PACs, also known as dark money. Odd: Why hasn't this already happened? Why hasn't the IRS been doing its job on this?

Good: Lockheed (yes, Lockheed) is close to producing a graphene-based product that could drastically lower the cost of desalinization. The biggest problem in desalinization is the amount of energy needed to force salt water through a filter. Graphene filters are 500 times thinner and a thousand times stronger, and require 1 percent of the pressure. To give a sense of the proportion, if graphene were as thick as a piece of paper, "the nearest comparable filter for extracting salt from seawater would be the thickness of three reams of paper." The graphene "membrane is thinner than the atoms it’s filtering." The filters may also have uses in dialysis and cleaning chemicals from the water used in fracking. Bad: No bad I can see so far, but given that it's a large corporation working on it, I'm sure they'll come up with something as it progresses, if nothing more than suing others who pursue the same technology for patent infringement.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Long Tiring Day, Therefore Game of Thrones Cats

I suppose the title is enough said.











There are more, including most of the Starks, but how many wide-eyed tabbies can you look at? My favorities: Davos, Robert, and Joffrey.

From the hard-to-credit maze that is Tumblr -- possibly original to catsecretstash.tumblr.com.



Sunday, March 17, 2013

Tell Amy No

It looks like our Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar is planning to vote yes to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which is planned to transport the Canadian tar sands oil (like butter only toxic) to the Gulf of Mexico, where it can be refined and shipped all over the world.

Apparently Klobuchar isn't sure about the connection between tar sands and climate change. But thank goodness she has proven she can tell a joke, which is the only piece of news I saw about her in today's paper.

This is the downside of having a member of Congress who thinks her seat is safe: She votes for big business interests instead of what's needed for our future. If she votes for the pipeline, I hope a real Democrat steps forward to challenge her for her seat.

And I hope all of my Minnesota readers will call Amy Klobuchar at 202-224-3244 to ask her not to approve the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

If you can, rally at her Minneapolis office at 2 p.m. tomorrow, Monday, March 18, at 1200 Washington Avenue South, Room 250. Even if it snows.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Who Are the Suckers?

Psychologist Anthony Pratkanis, University of  California-Santa Cruz, recently gave a talk on criminal scamming at CSICon 2012. His PowerPoint presentation is available, but here are a few points I found eye-opening.

Americans lose $40 billion a year to telemarketing fraud out of $110 billion total. To put that in perspective, the amount of money spent on the 2012 presidential election was a mere $6 billion.

As reported in the March/April 2013 Skeptical Inquirer coverage of his talk,

There is no evidence for the myth of the weak victim. The weak and the strong are taken. And the evidence indicates that seniors are less susceptible, not more; they are just targeted more.... And contrary to what you might expect, victims are more, not less, financially literate. They think they are immune. That makes them susceptible.
There is no profile of the kind of person who can be victimized by a con, but research does show that victims have experienced more negative life events, ranging from the death of a spouse to developing a medical condition that limits activity to having moved recently. (People who get involved with cults are also more likely to have had more negative life events.) 

Pratkanis and his colleagues are working with the FBI on a solution. It turns out, these con men share names of victims and keep "lead" sheets on them, the way a salesperson would, and share or sell them. And sometimes these files get seized by law enforcement. So Pratkanis and the FBI contact the victims before a con is completed to explain what's happening. They're working on a range of scripts and educational techniques to decrease gullibility and counter the social influence strategies used by con artists.

 According to Pratkanis, even one phone call can cut the victimization rate in half.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Tabs from Here and There

Here's what's been filling up my browser tabs for past week or two.

A nice graphic from Mother Jones, accompanying an article about how America's drinks got to be so big:

I remember those seven-ounce cups at McDonald's, I think, even in the late 1960s.

Continuing with the food theme, I'll bet you didn't know there's a website that contains nothing but photos of former Pizza Hut restaurants.


I've often noted the way these buildings are reused (for instance, there's one on the edge of northeast Minneapolis that's a vegetarian Indian restaurant), but this blogger did something about it.

Last weekend's "Up with Chris Hayes" had a great segment on some new research that found state legislators of both parties consistently over-estimate how conservative their constituencies are. It's not yet peer-reviewed, but the work by two graduate students found that “nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than is the most conservative district in the entire country.” Liberals weren't quite as far off, but they, too, think their constituents are farther right than they are. The finding held up on a range of issues, such as health care and same-sex marriage. The Washington Post's Wonkblog has a longer story on it, including scatter graphs from the paper. Link to the full paper (pdf)

The Daily Kos recently ran a guide to the conservative movement in one handy chart. They break down the movement into teabaggers, paleocons, corporate cons, neocons, theocons, and libertarians and provide useful categories like pet concern and biggest ally, plus short phrases to describe each type of conservative's perspective on a range of the usual topics. One topic is Obama, and the adjectives for each are Dictator, Communist, Socialist, Appeaser, Infidel and Tyrant.

The ACLU has begun a nationwide investigation of police militarization. My experience at the large, peaceful protest during the 2008 Republican National Convention made this real for me. It's a shock when you see the streets of your city occupied by what might as well be the military, even if they wear badges.

Informationisbeautiful.net has a nice (but scary) visualization of carbon challenge we face:


Lots more on the site.

I wanted to save Barbara and John Ehrenreich's article about the rise and decline of the professional managerial class. As with so much of her work, it doesn't fit into the list of topics I usually put in my filing system. I think it's an interesting article to read around the same time as Chris Hayes's book Twilight of the Elites.

This is fun, but also serious: More than you ever thought you could know about the differences between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to how egg sales are regulated. To wash or not to wash? To refrigerate or leave at room temperature?

And finally, I'm peeved with myself that I can't find a link to a piece of scholarly research I read about in the past few weeks; the tabs have failed me. It found that teen pregnancy itself is not the cause of the bad outcomes everyone associates with it -- rather, it was the low socio-economic status the mothers started with. Women from the same SES were no better off, on average, than the teen mothers among them, if I remember it correctly. Anyone who knows what I'm referring to, let me know. I think it was posted in the context of the discussion about the New York City ad campaign which many saw as shaming women. (Here's Melissa Harris-Perry's letter to Michael Bloomerg about the campaign.)

Thursday, March 14, 2013

When "And" Takes the Place of "E"

My best guess is that this is a logo for a loyalty club at a women's clothing store:

Blush P&rks sign
I'm not really sure on the details, though. Is it just for lingerie (as implied by the artwork and the use of the word blush) or for all of the merchandise?

But my biggest question is — who decided an ampersand makes sense as an E? Is this what passes for a concept these days? Out of the corner of my eye, I keep seeing it more as an O, since the lower part is so round.

BlushPORKS. Now there's a brand with possibilities.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The Cute, It Hurts, at Hallmark

Like me, you probably think of Hallmark stores as selling greeting cards, with some ornaments thrown in at Christmas time. Clearly, we are behind the times because these days Hallmark is trying to become the land of the painfully cute.

First there were the big-eyed creatures from Ty, the maker of Beanie Babies:

Shelves full of rounded, plush animals with huge round eyes
Then there was this latest incarnation of the Beanies themselves:

Three beanie babies with heads coming out of the wall of a pink and yellow tent-shaped bag
I'm not sure if those creatures are separable or are sewn into the tent/bag/whatever it is. They made me think of mounted trophy animals on a the wall.

Then there was Bigsby, the interactive story buddy:

Bigsby the interactive story buddy, looks sort of like Bigfoot or one of Sendak's wild things
This is probably the worst of all: An "interactive" doll that responds when you read specific books that can be bought only at Hallmark.

It combines things that drive parents crazy (things that make sound, repetition, branded stuff you can only get from one place) with the kind of external motivation children don't need when it comes to reading. All nicely packaged and placed alongside the birthday cards so well-meaning people can buy it for their little relatives.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Pioneer Press Goodness: Guns and Pies

The Star Tribune announced on Sunday that they were adding Hilary Price's "Rhymes with Orange" to their comics page, and the first thing I thought was, One less reason to read the Pioneer Press.

But then that day's PiPress had two stories that made my subscription worth it.

First was a longish article by Megan Boldt on the state of research on gun violence and deaths. It was very fair, with primary sourcing from people like Arthur Kellermann, who co-authored one of the best known studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. That study found that for "every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 suicides or suicide attempts."

Kellermann's study was condemned by the NRA and led to the 1996 law that scared the Centers for Disease Control into not funding any research on guns as a public health issue. Kellermann, who practiced and taught emergency medicine for 25 years, was labeled "politically slanted" and anti-gun by the NRA in a post-hoc fashion: If you find that guns have negative effects, you are anti-gun.

He now works for the Rand Corporation, which isn't exactly known as a bastion of liberal thought.

Boldt, like Maggie Koerth Baker's two-part article last week, points out that not much is known for sure. Yes, gun deaths from crime have declined while the number of guns has gone up, but no one really knows how many guns there are, and the number of nonfatal gun injuries have increased over the last three years. Suicides are also at a high point. Yes, background checks won't stop every crime, but there is evidence to indicate that they help somewhat, which is better than nothing.

A 2013 study published in the journal Injury Prevention surveyed prison inmates in the 13 states with the weakest gun laws to see where they got their guns and whether they would have been prevented from getting them if laws were stricter.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers found that nearly three of every 10 gun offenders would have been prohibited from purchasing or possessing a firearm when they committed their most recent offense if their states had more restrictive laws in place.

However, stricter gun laws would not have prevented the majority of gun crimes, the study found. About 34 percent of the inmates got their guns from family or friends and another 30 percent got them from drug dealers or other black-market sources.

"We are uncertain about the degree to which stricter legal standards for firearm possession might deter criminal gun possession and use," the researchers wrote. "But, adding barriers for the acquisition of guns by high-risk persons is an underused potential intervention."
The other excellent piece from Sunday's paper was by one of my favorites, Ed Lotterman. When a Cartoon Can Be a Problem critiqued a political cartoon by Michael Ramirez that ran in the PiPress a week or so ago.


A letter-writer the week before had pointed out the visual duplicity in the cartoon. J.M. Hamilton wrote:
Perhaps [Ramirez] has forgotten the formula for determining the area of a circle: pi times radius squared. Mr. Ramirez's 2007 pie is 1 inch in diameter; its area is 0.785 square inches. A 40-percent-larger pie would contain 1.099 square inches. Yet, Mr. Ramirez's 2013 federal budget pie has an area of 2.40 square inches -- three times the size of 2007.
That is the most outrageous problem with the cartoon, but Lotterman's column points out its economic weaknesses. As Lotterman put it,
There are two problems with the cartoon. The first is that the core of the cartoon is post hoc fallacy reasoning that would get an F in any logic class. The implicit message is that because Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress, the result is higher deficits. But if one looks at actual data, that argument is hard to sustain.
And then there is that darned data: That much of the deficit increase was "baked in" because of demographics (increased spending on Social Security and Medicare), or comes from things that Republicans are not willing to cut either, such as defense, or from extending unemployment benefits because of the economic crash.

So the PiPress reprieved itself with me. And, after being called out by several other letter-writers in addition to J.M. Hamilton in the past month, it seems as though the cartoons on the editorial page have been just a bit more balanced lately. Maybe it's my imagination, though. We'll see.

Monday, March 11, 2013

The Forever War's Many Covers

Recently, Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates read The Forever War, a 1974 science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman. I know this because Coates tweeted about it a number of times, remarking on how great the book was. And then he wrote about it for the Atlantic.

I read The Forever War myself back in the 1980s, and aside from the fact that it was about a soldier who lived a long time and fought in a war against aliens, I had no recollection of it whatsoever. I couldn't even find the paperback copy I'm sure I once owned, and that means I must have loaned it or sold it, another indication that I didn't care too much what happened to it.

On Coates's recommendation, I decided to read it again myself. But first I had to find it, so I headed over to Uncle Hugo's, the oldest continually operated science fiction bookstore in the country. Preferring hardcovers to any kind of paperback, I asked if they had a used copy, and they came up with a book club edition, printed in 1997.

This post isn't about the book, although I will say I can see why it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It's a great science fiction book, focusing on the problem of time elapsing during space travels, which most science fiction avoids with magic like warp drives and worm holes. The main character is compellingly written, too.

It's not as good as a work of speculative fiction, though, which is my primary interest in the genre. Haldeman's vision of human society's devolution and evolution seems simplistic to me, set up just as an excuse to drive the main character back to the military. And his casual inclusion of required intercourse from the female soldiers was pretty jarring, given our current situation with sexual assault in the U.S. military. As the narrator puts it, the women in his unit were "compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law)..."

But I'm not writing about the book, but rather its cover. My book club edition has one of the tackiest, most factually incorrect pieces of artwork on its front I've seen in all my science fiction reading, and that's saying a lot.

The main character is shown in some kind of chromey, steam-punk helmet with what looks like a leather jacket, big shades, and a bare face.


Illustration by Dorian Vallejo

I guess it's supposed to represent the fighting suits the soldiers wear, but since a person in the conditions described in the book would die with a bare face, that's really stupid. But it's a book club edition, so I guess that accounts for it.

This book has had a lot of different cover art over the years. Here are a few others:


The first edition cover. Note the early '70s typeface, Premiere Shadow. I haven't yet found a source online that credits the illustrator.


I think this may be the first paperback cover -- 1976, art by Patrick Woodroffe.


And this is the cover of my lost paperback copy, probably early 1980s.

Any of these is vastly superior to the guy in the leather jacket, even though the 1976 cover is only a "ships in space" bit of generica. There are a lot more covers to choose from, judging by the Google Images results.

So if you were of a mind to judge a book by its cover, The Forever War would give you a lot to think about.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Minimum Wage Thoughts

 Not one but two letters to the editor in today's Star Tribune worth reprinting here:

MINIMUM WAGE
Let’s put this issue in proper perspective

The debate over whether to raise the minimum wage got me thinking: What if there were a maximum wage? What if CEOs could not make 500 times what their lowest-paid workers earned? What if legislators only got paid if their work was finished? What if legislators had to live with the same medical and financial constraints as the people who elected them? What if …?
SCOTT DEVITT, Buffalo, Minn.

In reading the pro/con commentaries about raising the state’s minimum wage (Opinion Exchange, Feb. 24), I couldn’t help thinking of the furor caused when Henry Ford increased his workers’ wage to $5 a day. Naysayers predicted the company would soon be bankrupt, but production increased, costs fell and those same workers could afford a Ford.
DAN STRONG, Brooklyn Park
 

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Getting from There to Here

Just heard about phdcomics.com after a friend sent me this one by Jorge Cham.



It's perfect. I'll bet Maggie Koerth-Baker already knows about this, despite the somewhat undeserved slam at Boing Boing in the cartoon. (Or maybe they hired Maggie after this cartoon ran in 2009?)

Friday, March 8, 2013

Fixed that for You

Here's MinnPost's photo of a Minnesota for Marriage banner at yesterday's anti-marriage-equality demonstration at the state Capitol:

Neatly handmade banner hanging from a Capitol railing reads THE LEGALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY INDUCE CHILDREN TO GAY RELATIONSHIPS

I prefer my version:

Neatly handmade banner hanging from a Capitol railing revised to read THE LEGALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY INDUCES SUBJECT VERB AGREEMENT
(Oh, damn, I forgot the hyphen.)

And I should point out -- homosexuality is legal in Minnesota. It's marriage between people of the same sex that is not legal.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Reweighting the Pacifist's Dilemma Table

Has any group of people gotten together to figure out ways to reweight the quadrants of Steven Pinker's Pacifist's Dilemma grid from The Better Angels of Our Nature?

In the final chapter of the book, Pinker introduces what he calls the Pacifist's Dilemma. It's a twist on the classic Prisoner's Dilemma from game theory, in which two prisoners are set up to either compete or cooperate. If Prisoner A sells out Prisoner B, A goes free while B serves a year (and vice versa). If both confess, they each serve three months. If both stay silent, they each serve only one month. So clearly, they would be best off if both stayed silent, but the temptation to defect is strong. The dilemma is usually shown as a four-quadrant table like this:



In the Pacifist's Dilemma, the four comparable quadrants are labeled as follows:


As you can see, the penalty for pacifism in the face of aggression is extreme (-100), much less than the one for meeting aggression with aggression (-50). And the "costs to the victim (-100) are vastly disproportionate to the benefits to the aggressor (10)" (p. 679).

The question is, How can the basic assumptions of the Pacifist's Dilemma be changed or reweighted to make peace and prosperity a more likely outcome? This is what Pinker argues has been happening over the course of history, resulting in the decline in violence.

This seems like a job for public policy, so I'm thinking of a gathering of policy wonks and behavioral economists, plus Stewart Brand, Maggie Koerth-Baker, and Steven Johnson. They'll have to remember it all takes place in a context of global warming and peak oil.

It's the biggest of big picture questions. How do we start answering it?

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Words at Play, the Video

In which I discover the word misophania*, which I must admit describes a relatively mild quirk of mine that I try not to talk about much.


How many of the words did you already know? For me, it's somewhere between a third and a half.
_____
* The video shows the word as misophania, but googling it indicates it's probably spelled misophonia, which makes more sense, etymologically.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

An Idea for David Burley

Do people who work part-time need money less than people who work full-time?

That makes no sense. But people who are against raising the minimum wage seem to think that because 80 percent of people who receive minimum wage are part-timers, that's a reason to not raise it. This was repeated by local restaurateur David Burley in his Star Tribune op-ed today, when he wrote,

A national survey found that 70 percent of workers receiving minimum wage as their base salary at a restaurant are under age 25, and 80 percent work part time. That means they’re working and going to school, or working and raising kids, or working two jobs.
They're working and raising kids, or they're working two jobs. (Or they can't get enough hours because their employer doesn't want to pay for health care.) Do any of those indicate that part-time workers need money less than full-time workers?

Burley describes the restaurants he owns as places where servers are well-compensated, mostly through tips. They make an average of $24 an hour, while statewide "the average is around $18 an hour." Both amounts are well above the proposed minimum wage. So he thinks that if he has to increase the amount he pays, his employees will have a big bonus, while he'll be out the money.

Especially since he will soon start paying "$1,600 per employee in new annual health care expenses." Let's see, doing the math, that's only $133 a month per person. What kind of health insurance can you get for that? None that I'm familiar with that covers anything.

I wonder if all of that $24 an hour Burley's workers earn is reported to the IRS. We'll assume it is, since Burley is being so public about it.  So I have a suggestion for him:

Raise your wages to $24 an hour (or maybe $22.50 an hour if you want to charge your employees for the meager health insurance you're planning to offer soon), increase your prices accordingly, and put up a sign that says NO TIPPING.

You can then market your restaurants based on the no tipping policy, and everyone will be happy.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Unequal American Pie, the New Version

Dan Ariely's unequal American pie research has gotten a new presentation from some talented designers. It's only about 6 minutes long.


I wonder what arguments would be marshalled against this by those who think income- and wealth-inequality don't matter, or are actually good.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Brill's Bitter Pill

It may have taken a week, but reading Steve Brill's lengthy Time magazine article about the cost of medicine in America is worth it. I couldn't imagine reading it online, so I went out and bought a copy on the newsstand. This had the added benefit of rewarding Time, in a small way, for publishing it.

The upshot is that hospitals charge whatever the hell they want to people who don't have insurance, while insurance companies pay about half as much, and Medicare pays maybe 10 percent as much. And Medicare is not stiffing the hospitals -- its rates are based on what things cost, including overhead and even the education of medical students.

Things I learned from Brill

There's this thing called the "chargemaster," which is the source of hospitals' prices. The chargemaster prices from one hospital to the next have nothing in common. Hospital PR people repeatedly told Brill that the chargemaster rates don't matter, that "no one pays those." This was at the same time that he had called up to ask about people who were being charged the chargemaster rates. The chargemaster comes up with prices like $18 for a single diabetes test strip, which in reality costs no more than 55¢. Or a stress test with radioactive dye priced at $7,997.54 when Medicare pays $554 for the same test.

There's a whole industry that has sprung up, called medical billing advocates, made up of freelancers who help uninsured people get their bills lowered by negotiating with hospitals. They're usually people who used to work in claims for insurance companies, and Brill gives many examples. (They even have their own association, of course, called the Alliance of Claim Assistant Professionals.)

Nonprofit hospitals, especially large ones in urban and surburan areas, are not really nonprofits, despite their tax status with the IRS. They make huge profits and pay their CEOs (and many other high-level staffers) unreasonably high salaries. Nobody needs to make over a million dollars a year, let alone the head of a nonprofit organization:
  • MD Anderson (Houston's famous cancer hospital) president -- $1.845 million (not including compensation from pharmaceutical companies)
  • Stamford (Conn.) Hospital CEO -- $1.86 million 
  • Bridgeport (Conn.) Hospital CEO -- $1.8 million; CEO of its parent organization, $2.5 million
  • Mercy Hospital (Oklahoma City) CEO -- $1.93 million; executive vice president $3.7 million. Plus five other executives making over $1 million
The charity care provided by nonprofit hospitals, when priced according to Medicare prices instead of the inflated chargemaster rates, is worth only $3 billion -- which is less than half a percent of the hospitals' annual revenue. And this includes their bad debt, not just purposeful donations of care. Lots of for-profit companies give away more than half a percent of their annual revenue.

The nonprofit status of these hospitals leads to perverse incentives. Since they can't retain the earnings, they spend them on huge salaries and new buildings and equipment, which then require higher prices to pay for them.

Medical interests spend more money on lobbying than any other industry -- $5.36 billion in 1998, compared to just $1.3 billion by oil and gas interests or $1.53 billion by defense and aerospace, for instance.

Testing is a cash cow for whoever owns the equipment, whether the hospital or a medical practice. "A typical piece of equipment will pay for itself in one year if it carries out just 10 to 15 procedures a day." U.S. health care providers order 71 percent more CT scans than Germany, and despite its "low" payment rates, Medicare pays four times as much for CTs as Germany does. (That's because testing prices are directly controlled by Congress, which is lobbied heavily by the industry, rather than Medicare.)

The medical device tax, which is part of the Affordable Care Act and is opposed by every member of the Minnesota congressional delegation regardless of political party, is actually a good idea. Medical devices are over-used and should be curtailed. Minnesota's Medtronic has a profit margin of 75 percent. Compare that to Apple's profit margin of 40 percent. Huh.

Way too many people have insurance that doesn't cover anywhere near what things cost. As Brill put it, "the appeal of having something called health insurance for a few hundred dollars a month is far more compelling than comprehending the details" -- such as unrealistic day payment rates or low caps on total coverage.

Less good about the article

Brill, unfortunately, comes up short when it's time to talk about solutions. He offers some that are good, like allowing Medicare to negotiate prices on drugs and durable medical goods like wheel chairs. "If we paid what other countries did for the same [drugs], we would save about $94 billion a year" out of the current $280 billion we're paying.

He's also in favor of allowing Medicare to fund studies of comparative effectiveness, so that it can pay for drugs that are effective at the lowest cost, instead of every drug approved by the FDA.

He even flirts with the idea of lowering the Medicare age by, say, 10 years, while charging people to get into it -- and admits that such a change would save money for people and the government. How can that be, you ask? Well, under the Affordable Care Act, the government will be subsidizing care for low-income people, and they'll be paying a lot more for that care than if the patients were getting Medicare prices.

But then he bails out on this direction, saying this about the idea of single payer health care:
...no doctor could hope for anything approaching the income he or she deserves [emphasis added] (and that will make future doctors want to practice) if 100% of their patients yielded close to the low rates Medicare pays.

...the prospect of overhauling our system..., displacing all the private insurers and other infrastructure after all these decades, isn't likely. For there would be one group of losers -- and these losers have a lot of clout. They're the health care providers like hospitals and CT-scan-equipment makers whose profits -- embedded in the bills we have examined -- would be sacrificed. 
If doctors didn't have to go into incredible debt to get their degrees, they might be less motivated by money. There doesn't seem to be a problem recruiting doctors in European countries, because it's still a well-paid, high-status profession. And for Brill to throw up his hands at the existing infrastructure, after he's just spent 30 pages showing how sick it is, is beyond frustrating.

How did Canada make the change to single payer? It happened because one province did it, and then the outcry and demand from regular people in other parts of the country made it the law of the land everywhere. There's no reason that can't happen here, too, despite the entrenched interests.

Even Brill admits, "this is not about interfering in a free market. It's about facing the reality that our largest consumer product by far -- one-fifth of our economy -- does not operate in a free market."

His recommendations:
  • Tighten antitrust laws so hospitals can't dominate their regions and control prices
  • Tax hospitals 75 percent on their profits and on non-doctor salaries over $750,000
  • Outlaw the chargemaster
  • Amend patent laws or set price limits on drugs. "Just bringing their profit margins down to the level of software companies could save billions of dollars."
  • Decrease what Medicare pays for CTs and MRIs and cap what insurance companies pay for them
  • Implement medical malpractice reform to decrease defensive medicine
That last one sounds good on paper, though it has all sorts of problems operationally. But I'm willing to go along with well-thought-out malpractice reform if we can make a lot of other changes first.

Steve Brill may not think single-payer is realistic, but he's certainly provided the movement with a lot of high-profile ammunition.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Playing with Food

I was in a toy store the other day. This is a store that specializes in natural baby supplies and wooden toys, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I couldn't help being amused when I got into the food and kitchen area.

The play food was a lot healthier than what I remember:


Pita sandwiches made from felt, full of vegetables. With purple onions.


And wooden garlic... and mushrooms... and jalapeños.

And then there's the coffee maker, which looks suspiciously like an espresso-maker to me.


Gotta start 'em young on the hipster caffeine addiction.


Friday, March 1, 2013

Gutted

This may be the coolest fact I never knew: The White House was completely gutted in 1950.

Interior of White House completely gutted and reinforced with beams
National Archives photo

Quoting the National Journal:

Experts called the third floor of the White House "an outstanding example of a firetrap." The result of a federally commissioned report found the mansion's plumbing "makeshift and unsanitary," while "the structural deterioration [was] in 'appalling degree,' and threatening complete collapse." The congressional commission on the matter was considering the option of abandoning the structure altogether in favor of a built-from-scratch mansion, but President Truman lobbied for the restoration.

"It perhaps would be more economical from a purely financial standpoint to raze the building and to rebuild completely," he testified to Congress in February 1949. "In doing so, however, there would be destroyed a building of tremendous historical significance in the growth of the nation."

So it had to be gutted. Completely. Every piece of the interior, including the walls, had to be removed and put in storage. The outside of the structure-reinforced by new concrete columns-was all that remained.
More photos available on the National Journal site.

Via kottke.org